Historische corpora
Nederlab
Een gebruiksvriendelijke en hulpmiddelrijke open access webinterface die zicht richt op het verzamelen van alle gedigitaliseerde teksten die relevant zijn voor het nationale Nederlandse erfgoed en de geschiedenis van de Nederlandse taal en cultuur (circa 800 - nu).
Voor de 12e eeuw: Corpus Oudnederlands
Het Corpus Oudnederlands is de verzameling van al het overgebleven Nederlandse woordmateriaal uit de periode 475-1200 dat als bronmateriaal heeft gediend voor het Oudnederlands Woordenboek (ONW).
Uitgangspunt waren de Oudnederlandse teksten die de Gentse taalkundige Maurits Gysseling had verzameld en getranscribeerd. Het corpus bestaat uit drie grote teksten (Wachtendonkse Psalmen, Leidse Willeram, Mittelfränkische Reimbibel) en talrijke kleinere Oudnederlandse teksten en tekstfragmenten (waaronder runeninscripties), glossen en losse woorden, Frankisch materiaal en toponymisch materiaal. Het corpus is taalkundig verrijkt met woordsoort en lemma. De annotatie is handmatig nagekeken voor het hele corpus.
Wat is Oudnederlands?
Het Oudnederlands is de verzamelnaam voor een aantal verwante dialecten die – net als het Oudengels, het Oudfries, het Oudsaksisch en het Oudhoogduits – rond het begin van de vijfde eeuw zijn ontstaan uit het West-Germaans. Het werd gesproken in een gebied dat samenviel met het huidige Nederland (mogelijk met uitzondering van de kuststreek van Groningen tot aan de Oude Rijn in de provincie Zuid-Holland), het Nederlandstalige deel van België, Frans-Vlaanderen en een stuk van Duitsland tussen de Nederlandse grens, de Rijn en de zogenaamde Benrather Linie, de grens tussen het Neder- en het Hoogduitse taalgebied.
De afgrenzing tussen Oudnederlands, Oudsaksisch en Oudfries is soms lastig te maken. De redactie van het Oudnederlands Woordenboek (ONW), die verantwoordelijk was voor de samenstelling van het corpus, heeft een ruim opnamebeleid gehanteerd. Toch zijn niet alle teksten uit de oorspronkelijke Oudnederlandse tekstverzameling van Gysseling in het corpus opgenomen, zoals het gedicht de Heliand, omdat die tekst Oudsaksisch is.
13th century: Gysseling Corpus
The Gysseling Corpus is the collection of all 13th-century texts that have served as source material for the Dictionary of Early Middle Dutch (VMNW). The corpus consists mainly of official and literary sources of thirteenth-century texts that have been handed down in 13th-century manuscripts.
The texts are diplomatic editions, which means that the source texts have been rendered in modern script as accurately as possible. The corpus has been linguistically annotated with word classes and modern Dutch lemmas (entry words) to enhance its searchability. The annotation of the entire corpus has been manually verified.
14th - 16th century: Corpus of Middle Dutch
The Corpus of Middle Dutch is a collection of rhyming texts and prose from the period of 1300-1550. It contains classics such as Beatrijs, Van den vos Reynaerde, the abele spelen, the stories about King Arthur and about Charlemagne, all texts from the famous Gruuthuuse manuscript (including the Egidius song), but also many of the lesser known or less researched texts, such as prose adaptations of the rhyming knight’s tales (the so-called ‘folk books’), collections of songs such as the Antwerp Songbook, various Bible translations, hagiographies, books of prayer, chronicles, and all kinds of religious, didactic and scientific treatises, medical manuals and recipes.
The corpus was compiled on the basis of mainly critical, scientifically sound text editions. In time, it will be annotated with word classes and lemmas, to improve searchability.
17th century: Newspaper Corpus
The Couranten Corpus comprises the seventeenth-century Dutch newspapers available on Delpher (delpher.nl/kranten). The oldest surviving newspapers were published in 1618. For the Delpher-website the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague has scanned the newspapers. In a citizen science project all newspapers were transcribed and corrected by more than 300 volunteers of the Stichting Vrijwilligersnetwerk Nederlandse Taal, led by Nicoline van der Sijs. Subsequently, metadata were added and checked, for instance on genre (advertisements, national news, international news).
This sizeable corpus currently contains the contents of 13 newspapers, 109.532 articles and 18.926.425 words. The information in these newspapers is of interest to researchers of various disciplines, ranging from historians to historical linguists, literature scholars and art historians.
In the future, transcriptions of newly digitised newspapers from the seventeenth century and newspapers from the eighteenth century will be added to the Couranten Corpus.
This first online accessible version of the Couranten Corpus was released on 12th May 2022.
17th - 19th century: Letters as Loot
Approximately 40,000 Dutch letters from the second half of the 17th to the early 19th century have been gathering dust for centuries in British archives. They were sent home by sailors and others from abroad but also vice versa by those staying behind who needed to keep in touch with their loved ones. Many letters did not reach their destinations: they were taken as loot by privateers and confiscated by the High Court of Admiralty during the wars fought between The Netherlands and England. These confiscated letters of men, women and even children represent priceless material for historical linguists. They allow us to gain access to the as yet mainly unknown everyday Dutch of the past, the colloquial Dutch of people from the middle and lower classes.
The first extensive sociolinguistic analysis of these Dutch letters was conducted in the Letters as Loot research programme (2008-2013) at Leiden University. This research concentrated on a selection of about one thousand Dutch private letters from the late seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, written by more than 700 different letter writers.
17th - 19th century: Letters as Loot-2
Letters as Loot-2 is a spin-off of the Letters as Loot research programme (2008-2013) at Leiden University. This corpus is an addition to the original Letters as Loot corpus. It comprises more than 1300 Dutch letters which were taken as loot by privateers and confiscated by the High Court of Admiralty during the wars fought between The Netherlands and England from the second half of the 17th to the early 19th centuries.
17th - 19th century: Letters as Loot - Gold Standard
Letters as Loot – Gold Standard contains ca. 1000 source files from the Letters as Loot program (directed by Prof. Dr. M.J. van der Wal), each enriched with main part-of-speech and modern lemmata.
20th century: The VU-DNC Corpus
A diachronic Dutch newspaper corpus (VU Free University Dutch Newspaper Corpus). (More info under Newspaper corpora)
Public Domain Data @ DBNL
A corpus of public domain books and texts available from the Royal Library in the Netherlands
Delpher: historical newspapers, magazines, books and radio bulletins
Delpher is a freely accessible website, developed and operated by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, featuring digitized historical Dutch newspapers, books, magazines and radio bulletins from libraries, museums and other heritage institutions.